For the Children

Florida book bans, culture wars, and airport rituals

Photo by Tom Hermans on Unsplash

! Rant Warning !

We don’t need dystopian fiction.

Just read some of the articles below and you’ll see we’re living it. (At least as far as free thought and expression go). The right and left are at it again, seeking to parent not only their own children, but everyone else’s children in the country while they’re at it.

1. Missouri libraries facing defunding over book bill.

2. Florida book bans listed here.

3. Roald Dahl is being rewritten to be more inclusive.

4. Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey gets a trigger warning…for sexism.

5. An Oklahoma teacher trying to teach a lesson on book bans gets run out of town.

Here’s the gist of it. They’re working on defunding libraries in Missouri (in an effort to keep sexual material out of the hands of kids). They’re taking books off the shelves in Florida school districts (because talking about race or sex in any way at any age is considered dangerous by the state). Roald Dahl is going to get his books rewritten (for calling people fat). And a university decided that Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey needs a trigger warning (for sexism).

I don’t think the majority of people want this. I have friends across the political spectrum. I have yet to meet one that thinks they need to have every written thought monitored and approved by small groups of mob mentality parents and governors who evidently don’t have the time to check on what their own children are reading and need librarians to do it for them.

News flash: You don’t get to tell other people how to live, think, and raise their kids.

An anecdote.

When I was in high school, my teacher sent home permission slips so that we could watch Schindler’s List. I was seventeen or eighteen at the time, and out of a class of 30, one kid wasn’t allowed to watch it. (Because nudity).

These parents have always been around. That’s why the teacher took the precaution and got the damn slip signed. It’s their prerogative to opt out of whatever lesson or material they want to in a school. You know what they don’t get to do? Tell every other parent that they have to abide by the same rules. They don’t get to take it off the shelves. They get to tell Johnny that he’s not allowed to read that book because insert personal belief that you are freely allowed to have in this country here.

I came out of the equivalent of a Christian fundamentalist cult and realized to my horror that it wasn’t just the fundamentalists who had lost their minds. They were just a flavor, a symptom of the greater culture at large. Right, left, religious, atheist, the whole world seems bent on forcing everyone to agree with them. It follows that books are on the chopping block.

Writing often offers a counterpoint to the cultural narrative. In fiction, you can humanize a villain, flip a trope to expose prejudice or bias in society, turn religious figures evil, make the reader hate a victim, then turn the whole story around before the end and make the reader realize that they sided with the wrong character, that maybe they were the villain all along.

Nothing makes me realize my propensity for badness more than books. Nothing makes me want to realize my propensity for goodness more than books. Story can guide us if we let it.

But it seems that literalism has turned the whole culture mad. Maybe it’s the lack of education, the enormous ingestion of quippy social media and internet culture, the reduction of reading overall, but people don’t seem to get it. We need every kind of story. The whole spectrum of human existence. Why pretend some of it doesn’t exist? Even the bad things?

And let’s be clear here. A lot of what prompts censorship isn’t even bad. It’s sex. A very real and normal part of human existence that parents seem terrified of their children finding out about. Before the printing press, there was sex. I don’t see what restricting libraries is going to do about that exactly.

I guess it’s this idea that the whole culture is in decline, a message I heard parroted from the pulpits at mega church gatherings for the entirety of my youth. It was only when I started reading history books that I realized, to my genuine shock, that teenage sex occurred even without the influence of MTV. When were we, as Americans, at our peak culturally? When were children behaving just right? When were marriages better than they’ve ever been? It’s always been a shit show. Welcome to being human.

The peak…

Where do we see this thing ending?

Do we give into one worldview (right or left or anything in between), and sacrifice huge swaths of human opinion and experience and expression? We better fucking not, or we’ll be well on our way to the oppressive regimes we see in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, or Communist China under Mao. Do you see that it’s not as simple as religious vs. atheist, Republican vs. Democrat, the educated vs. the laymen?

I can’t put it any better than this poem, so brilliantly read and posted by Sherman Alexie a couple of weeks ago.

A Book is a Loaded Gun

Anyone who wants to silence someone who thinks differently than they do is a danger to free thought and expression. We have to change course, and defend other people’s rights to do so, even when we disagree with them.

And don’t get me wrong. This is a real struggle for me.

I have to remind myself multiple times a day that each person gets to think whatever they want, because when it comes down to it, I tend to think that I’m right about everything. It’s embarrassing but true. Fortunately, I read enough to know that I’m actually just a baby on the earth, a child experiencing the world for a short time before my body returns to the dust, which means I have to be open minded about everything. And I’ve been wrong a lot.

Reading opened me up to that reality.

No one has the right to take that experience away from another independent human being. No one entity, party, religion, country, company, or group gets to control our thoughts or the right to express those thoughts. Reading and writing are human rights. Resisting anyone who wants to infantilize entire school districts, states, libraries, universities, parents, and readers by trying to take them away is a must.

So what can we do about it?

Read the banned books.

Get involved with your library.

Parent your kids instead of everyone else’s.

And if you’re a writer, write without fear of any side of the issue. The ideologues are all going to hate it. Good.

---

We interrupt this rant for a happy book story.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, I wanted to write about a weird ritual I’ve developed.

I don’t go to bookstores anymore.

I know, I know. It’s probably against the law for me to admit this, but it’s true. I work a lot and I have children, which means I hate leaving the house. Well, that part is because I’m somewhat introverted and need time to just be, preferably not in traffic.

Thankfully, there are airports, and in airports there are bookstores.

I love them. The selection isn’t always good. Usually I only find one or two books that seem interesting, but there is something about it. Being trapped in a gate, waiting for a flight, and wandering in for a look at what’s selling. Now that I’ve confessed this guilty pleasure, let me rewind to last week.

I was in the Vegas airport facing a long layover. My kids and I were wandering looking for candy and chips and all junk food related snacks to buy, when I remembered a little store with a wall or two of books. I’d purchased a handful of Stephen King novels there last summer, and was hoping I’d find something again. We made our way to it and perused the shelves to see what they had to offer. Most I had never heard of. An entire section was dedicated to crosswords.

I was pretending to be open minded, but the truth was that I was hunting for a specific book. Don’t Fear the Reaper by Stephen Graham Jones came out a couple of weeks ago, and I saw a Twitter post where he found his book in an airport, albeit not the Las Vegas one. Still, the image was stuck in my mind and I was determined to discover a copy there. The cover is bright red, unmissable, and I couldn’t find anything that looked like it.

See what I mean?

I was about to give up when I bent down to find a pile of books strewn over some magazine shelves. I lifted the top one, and lo and behold, there it was. The only one in the whole store. What is that if not real life magic?